10 Facts About Walter Bezanson

Walter E Bezanson was a scholar and critic of American literature best known for his studies of Herman Melville and contributions to the Melville revival that restored the writer to prominence in the 1940s and 1950s.

Walter Bezanson was a founding member and three-time president of the Melville Society, which established the Walter Bezanson Memorial prize in his honor.

Walter Bezanson graduated from Needham High School in and received his undergraduate from Dartmouth College.

Walter Bezanson then joined a group of graduate students at Yale University who worked under Stanley Williams, who encouraged them to explore the then neglected works and life of Herman Melville.

Walter Bezanson was on the aircraft carrier Intrepid off the coast of Japan when the war ended.

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Walter Bezanson taught in the English Department at Harvard for three years, but was attracted to the greater freedom and opportunity to build new programs at Rutgers University, where he taught for the next 35 years.

Walter Bezanson was in the generation of scholars of the Melville revival who questioned the earlier view that Melville lost interest in writing in the 1850s when his fiction was poorly received.

Over several decades Walter Bezanson found evidence and developed arguments that Melville based the character Vine on Nathaniel Hawthorne In 1960, Walter Bezanson published the results of his several decades of study in the Hendrick's House edition of Clarel, which included extensive notes and annotations.

Walter Bezanson saw two Ishmaels, an earlier Ishmael who witnessed the events, and Ishmael the later writer.

Walter Bezanson supplied the "Historical Note" for the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Israel Potter.